Healing the Unimaginable

Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

Alison Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367107178
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429914461
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control is a practical, task-oriented, instructional manual designed to help therapists provide effective treatment for survivors of these most extreme forms of child abuse and mental manipulation.

CHAPTER ONE

A therapist’s first experience with ritual abuse and mind control

Working with ritual abuse and mind control survivors is probably the biggest challenge you will ever have in your professional life. For many therapists, one of the most demanding, upsetting and exciting periods occurs at the very beginning of such work. It is a kind of “hit the ground running” time. They must deal with disclosures that force them to face unimaginable realities for the first time, which will almost immediately demand new skills and knowledge. And sometimes, they must also contend with whether or not the other healthcare systems involved in their clients’ care will be willing and able to help them appropriately.

My initiation into this work came through a group of four ritually abused clients, one of whom was “Lorraine.”

In memoriam Lorraine

A few weeks before it happened, she asked me earnestly, “Is it a mortal sin if you kill yourself?” And I said no. I knew I was giving her permission, in a sense. I had told the parts of her that wanted to die that if they killed the parts that did not want to die it would be murder. They kept taking an internal vote, and each time more of them wanted to go. I never told them not to.

Lorraine was one of my first few clients with what was then called MPD, multiple personality disorder. She was crippled with severe osteoarthritis, and had to use a wheelchair. When she was Lorraine, she was a sweet-natured, gentle, considerate, laughing, roly-poly woman who loved to read and to sew. When she was Big Susie, she was a playful five-year-old who had a collection of giant dolls and a huge stuffed gorilla. Lorraine sewed clothes for the dolls. When she was Little Susie, she was a terrified, mute three-year-old. I was also acquainted with Morgue, pronounced Mor-Gew, who called for the suicide votes.

I got to know Lorraine because she was the best friend of another client who also suffered from what we now call DID, dissociative identity disorder. (The name change reflected the revised view that someone with the disorder was one fragmented person rather than a lot of different people sharing one body. But most who have the disorder feel more as if it is MPD.) My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days.

Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while.

Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the “borderline personality disorder” diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.

It had taken me a while to recognize MPD in any of my clients. Teresa was the first. She kept talking about her “inner child.” And I did not realize how real this child was until one day she stole a wheelchair from the hospital to which my clinic was attached, and took it for a joyride around the grounds. When confronted by hospital staff, she told them she was my employee. I began to pay attention to this “inner child,” named Stuffy, from having been stuffed in a closet.

As soon as realized that I was treating MPD clients, I read the few existing books on the condition, attended a workshop at the Justice Institute, and used some sexual abuse prevention money to organize a workshop where therapists could exchange information and educate each other about dissociation. There, I learnt something that I found really shocking. Many people suffering from MPD had been severely abused throughout their childhood years by organized groups, including Satanic and other “dark-side” religious cults. Moreover, quite a few of them were still involved in those groups, although they were not aware of their involvement, because it was other “personalities”—dissociated parts of them—who went off to the groups’ rituals. I was skeptical, to say the least.

Shortly after I began work with Teresa, I acquired another MPD client, a supposedly schizophrenic young man I will call Tony. He called in to the clinic on a day I was on telephone duty, saying he was having flashbacks of “ritual abuse.” I did not yet know what that was. Tony became my client. He could be quite entertaining. I have a vivid memory of him as a three- year-old, “Tiny Tony,” standing on his head on my office couch, and running down the hall to try unsuccessfully to make it to the bathroom. He had in his head the entire rock band of Guns’n’Roses, and I got to know Axl, the band leader, quite well. I remember the time Tony was in hospital and I went to visit him; Axl popped out and said, “Remember, we’re schizophrenic in here!”

The last of my first four was a teenage girl whom I will call Jennifer, who had been removed from her home because she had disclosed sexually abusing her younger brother. Although she was in foster care, Jennifer told me that she kept seeing her mother, with whom she was supposed to have no contact, outside her foster home or at the bus stop she used. I did not know what this meant. Then one day Tony told me that he’d “woken up” at midnight standing on the corner at the gas station near where he lived, apparently waiting for a ride.

One day, I gave Teresa a ride home from treatment. Her ancient grandmother was at her apartment helping her pack her things for a move. By this time Teresa had disclosed sexual abuse by her father as well as both her parents being alcoholics. I took this opportunity for a confrontation, as people did in those days. I said to the grandmother triumphantly, “Teresa has told me all about what happened to her!” “Oh?” the old woman said in a creaky voice. “And just what has she told you?” “Alcoholism and sexual abuse!” I proclaimed triumphantly. The grandmother breathed what appeared to be a sigh of relief, and said, “Oh, I’m just an old woman, I wouldn’t know about those things.” It was a very strange response.

Then another strange thing happened. Teresa was the single parent of a very young child, and had been seeing me about her parenting difficulties. Her child was in and out of foster care. One day, she called both me and the child protection worker and said she could not handle the little girl any longer and had to give her up for adoption. She was determined to sign the papers and give her up, but I was mystified by it, because Teresa’s parenting had improved considerably and I knew she really loved her daughter. I would not be able to make sense of these mysteries until I had learnt all about the lives of the rest of my “first four.”

Gradually, the story came out. Teresa mentioned that she had known Tony in junior high school. It turned out that she still knew him—he was part of the cult group she still attended, along with her family. So was Jennifer (and her family). And Lorraine, whom at that point I had only been seeing for a short time. Tony’s mother was the cult’s high priestess, his stepfather was a kind of regional manager. All four of these clients not only had been abused by the same people, mostly their family members, but they were still being abused and forced to take part in abusive rituals. So, of course, was Teresa’s little daughter, until Teresa gave her up permanently. It was not until Teresa gave up the child for adoption that she began to disclose her own ritual abuse.

My initial excitement at working with this newly understood diagnosis was rapidly diminishing. At the same time I was developing compassion for these people who lived part of their lives in a living hell, and this motivated me to embrace the challenges they presented. I worked hard with them, and I soon discovered that other people—the cult—were working with them, too. They lurked outside my office waiting to kidnap my clients and take them somewhere to re-abuse them as a punishment for talking to me. They set off “programs,” the conditioned responses which my clients’ child parts had been trained to perform, such as falling asleep in session, calling them and reporting what we’d talked about, being unable to understand English, cutting themselves, or trying to hurt me. They made various threats to terrified child parts of my clients, that they would harm or kill them or me or other people they cared for if they did not stop coming to therapy and stop talking about what had happened and was happening to them. (I did not believe they would be stupid enough to kill me, since I knew their names and had given them to the police.)

Also, I discovered that the cult had a regular pick-up system for their members outside the mental hospital at dinnertime, so any members who were currently hospitalized would go out there for a “smoke”, and be picked up and returned before hospital staff could check on them. I shared this information with Lorraine’s psychiatrist. He began putting her in the general hospital rather than the psychiatric hospital when she needed respite. She did much better there, though she told me that cult members had come by at night and threatened her. Lorraine had been living in a group home for the mentally ill, but now she had the new MPD diagnosis, the managers refused to house her. She was given an apartment on the top floor of a seniors’ building. From there she would venture out in her wheelchair to go to the library or shopping. I soon discovered that she was not safe, that cult people would ambush her whenever she was out and took great sport in harming her. They obtained a key to her apartment and could get in whenever they wanted. They would get her to invite Teresa over, then show up and hurt both of them. It was a nightmare.

I could not cancel everything else in my life because I was seeing these people. In the summer I took a month-long vacation with my family, traveling around Europe; it was something I had to do before my eldest child left home. When I returned, Lorraine was in the psychiatric emergency ward, where she had apparently been almost the entire time. The hospital had scheduled a meeting regarding her for the day I returned, a Wednesday. She was to be discharged the next day.

I visited Lorraine in hospital just before the meeting. She told me that she had been picked up on the street by some cult people, who had told her that if she did not kill herself properly this time, they would kill me, her psychiatrist, her sister in a neighboring city, and her sister’s children. Most parts of Lorraine were children, and they believed this threat. She had been tortured enough to know these people were indeed capable of murder. On leaving, I wrote a note in the ward’s book, which was only for hospital staff, saying, “Do not discharge her until I’ve had a chance to see her again. If you do, she will kill herself.” I described the threat. Then I went to the meeting at the hospital. There, I learned that the powers-that-be had decided Lorraine was too much trouble, so she was to be transferred to housing in another city, where I could not see her any longer.

The psychiatrist called me that night. He had read my note and believed me. He said that he would not be able to keep Lorraine in hospital until I could see her the next week, and asked whether it would make a difference if he discharged her on Thursday or Sunday. I said no, she was not safe either way. I had a full schedule for the first two weeks, since a lot of people had been waiting to see me. I could not see her until Monday at the earliest. He discharged her on Thursday. Early on Saturday morning, he called to tell me that Lorraine had fallen, or jumped, out of the window of her apartment to her death. There was no investigation. She had been suicidal for many years, so it was assumed to be suicide, not murder.

But to me, it was very suspicious. The bathroom window Lorraine had gone out of was a tiny one, and almost impossible to open, let alone to squeeze through, as it was quite high up from the floor. Lorraine was fat and had no muscle tone; I could not imagine her doing it alone. Her apartment door was locked.

Lorraine had no relatives in town who cared about her. She had grown up in a group home, where her original cult abuse had happened, as the group home parents were cult-involved and used the children they looked after in the cult rituals and other evil activities.

Lorraine’s younger sister came to town to dispose of her possessions, and there was a brief memorial service at the funeral chapel. I was one of the people who spoke about Lorraine and Susie to those who attended, including several suspicious-looking people. I was sad, but not as sad as I had been when Lorraine was alive and constantly being re-abused and tortured by people who were not acknowledged to exist. At least she was no longer subject to this lack of safety. It was over. She could not go through that any longer. I made it clear to the cult at the memorial service that on this subject at least I agreed with them.

Teresa, overcome with grief, was hospitalized shortly after Lorraine’s death. I was aware that she and Lorraine had made a suicide pact years earlier that if one of them died the other would follow. When I tried to visit her in the hospital, I was met at the door by the psychiatrist in charge of the ward, whose job was specifically to exclude me. He gave me a story about how therapists who were not on the hospital staff could not do therapy in the hospital as it could subject the hospital to liability if anything then happened to their patients. Oh, yes. That was their main concern, liability. Of course, if the psychiatric hospital system had only taken the threats and disclosures seriously and kept Lorraine safe, none of this would have happened. If some outside therapist had exposed their failure to care for the most vulnerable of their patients, what would have happened?

They did not invite her psychiatrist or me to her obligatory “death review.” They were probably glad to be rid of her.

Teresa did not kill herself, despite ongoing abuse. Both she and Jennifer survived murder attempts disguised as suicide, but this time there was no question: people broke into their apartments and stuffed all their pills down their throats. Teresa was sufficiently recovered to make contacts in another city far away. She moved there, and is now doing well.

I managed to get Tony’s father, who lived on the other side of the continent, to take custody of him and try to get him help there, but Tony disappeared the next summer and reappeared in our city with his mother, once more diagnosed “schizophrenic.” I completed therapy with Jennifer, and she moved to another country, where she is also doing well. So, two out of the four made it to safety and relative health. Two were lost.

I remember Lorraine’s freckled face, her sweet smile, and her gentle nature. I still have her stuffed bear, which other clients hold when they need comfort. I wish I had been able to keep her safe. I wish the mental health system had recognized the evil that they were abetting when they misdiagnosed her and kept her subject to so many more years of abuse. I applaud the psychiatrist who had the courage to look at a new diagnosis and break rank to attempt to work with me. I sincerely hope Lorraine’s next life, or her afterlife (if she has one), is the opposite of what this one was.

As some of you already know, the first experience of a therapist working with ritual abuse or mind control survivors involves shock, disbelief, and confusion. I remember that with Teresa, I became first shocked, then disbelieving, as she disclosed sexual abuse by one person after another before the ritual abuse became evident. I thought, “How could one person be abused by so many people?” It did not occur to me initially that these abusers were all connected to the cult or to her parents. I could not conceive the true nature of the abuse that would unfold.

I was also very confused about Teresa’s multiplicity, and discounted her “inner child” as part of the latest self-help fad. I did not really realize that it was possible for a person to have different self-states separated by walls of amnesia, so total that one state would not remember what another state had done. Teresa had a habit of confabulating to cover when she did not remember what happened, and she had acquired quite a reputation among service providers because of what they called “lying.” In actual fact, she just did not remember, so she made something up. My first task with her and my other dissociative clients was to learn about dissociative disorders. If you do not know about dissociative disorders, stop right here. You will need to read some of the books recommended in Appendix I before you proceed. The deliberate creation of dissociative disorders is basic to ritual abuse and mind control, and unless you understand how dissociative disorders work, you will be very confused by these clients and will not be able to help them.

The second reaction of most therapists working with these clients is a combination of horror and fear. First of all, there is the sheer horror of the memories they are disclosing. Sadistic torture, murder of fetuses, painful electroshock to infants and children, gang rapes, necrophilia, bestiality, drowning, near-death experiences . . . you name it, you will hear about it. Your clients need you to be able to hear these memories with calm compassion. You need to be strong enough to hear these things and not have the color drain from your face. Your client will see such involuntary reactions as indicators that you cannot handle what they are disclosing, and you will hear no more.

We are all traumatized, especially by the first few clients with these kinds of experiences that we encounter. We have to pay attention to our own vicarious traumatization (see Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995), and make sure we take care of ourselves so that we are not constantly living in a state of trauma. Any of our own past trauma, too, can be activated by what our clients disclose. So it is important to have competent supervision or consultation and, if necessary, our own therapy. It is important that the supervision and consultation be with someone who is experienced with dissociative disorders and ideally with ritual abuse and mind control, too, although at this point not many experienced therapists have such a background.

And we must address the risk to the clients. Many of our ritually abused or mind-controlled clients engage in self-harming behavior, which is actually the behavior of parts who have been trained to do this as punishment for disclosures. Most therapists do not realize this, and spend a lot of time and energy on trying to convince clients not to “act out.” The clients commonly attempt suicide, also a trained behavior, induced by parts of the mind who either think they must kill themselves before the perpetrators kill them in a gruesome manner, think someone they love will be killed if they do not (like Lorraine), or believe they will not die but will be rewarded when the body dies.

This is very stressful for therapists. We spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our clients’ safety, and feeling helpless in the face of these behaviors. These behaviors can also get our clients involved in the psychiatric hospital system, which can, in some cases, be helpful, but in other cases can be problematic, bringing on peer pressure to treat the clients with medication and confinement and give them other diagnoses than the correct one of dissociative disorder.

But this is only the beginning of the feeling of risk. When we discover that in many, though not all cases, the clients are still being abused and are being forced to take part in abuse of others, our protective instincts go on constant alert. If the clients have children, we realize that these children are at risk and we have to make decisions about reporting something that will probably not be believed. We become anxious about every cult or family holiday time, along with our client, and we imagine the horrors they might be going through.

Acknowledging that our clients are often in “current contact” with their abusers is frustrating and, often, frightening. As therapy progresses with “current contact” clients, and the clients stop going back to the group when they are supposed to, the risk to the clients does increase. The teenager, Jennifer, came to one session late with her arms badly slashed. She told me that she had not done it; a cult person had waylaid her on the way to the office and done it in the hope of getting her admitted to hospital where they could have more access to her. I chose to believe her, since she had never lied to me. Remember that both she and Teresa experienced attempted murder disguised as suicide attempts, and Lorraine’s death w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter One: A therapist’s first experience with ritual abuse and mind control (with thanks to “Lorraine”, “Teresa”, “Tony”, and “Jennifer”)
• Chapter Two: Ritual abuse and mind control: the definition evolves
• Chapter Three: The basics of therapy
• Chapter Four: Markers of mind control and ritual abuse
• Chapter Five: “Ritual” abuse: religious and creed-based abuses with contributions by:
• Chapter Six: Military, political, and commercial uses of mind control with contributions by:
• Chapter Seven: A reversed Kabbalah trainer speaks contributed by Stella Katz
• Chapter Eight: The programming: indoctrination, lies, and tricks
• Chapter Nine: Understanding and working with alters’ jobs and hierarchies with a contribution by:
• Chapter Ten: Dealing with programming: alternative strategies with contributions by:
• Chapter Eleven: “Stabilization” takes on a new meaning
• Chapter Twelve: “Maybe I made it up” with contributions by:
• Chapter Thirteen: Boundaries and bonds: the therapeutic relationship with contributions by:
• Chapter Fourteen: Treating programmed pedophilia (with thanks to “Jennifer”)
• Chapter Fifteen: The unimaginable
• Chapter Sixteen: Working with the traumatic memories
• Chapter Seventeen: Successful resolution: co-consciousness or integration with contributions by:
• Chapter Eighteen: Ritual abuse and mind control treatment: greater than the sum of its parts
• Appendix 1: Resources (books and websites)
• Appendix 2: Satanic calendar
• References
• Index